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umafuckitt writes:

Early microscopists and electrophysiologists were pathfinders who built their own hardware to perform their experiments. Today, whilst much cutting edge biology still requires the experimenter to develop new equipment, a huge amount of excellent work can be done with off-the-shelf hardware.

The problem, however, is that a lot of this equipment is over-priced for what it is and it's usually closed and so hard to hack. Thus, it may not be surprising that a home-brew hardware revolution is quietly taking place in biology. Rather than building novel equipment, a lot of today's scientists are coming up with much cheaper and more flexible solutions for existing commercial devices. Opensource hardware is a great way of stretching grant money, bringing science into schools, and allowing researchers in poorer countries to do more with their limited budgets. Central to most Opensource hardware projects are easy to use microcontroller packages, such as Arduino, Maple, and Teensy, allowing biologists with no engineering background to re-invent their closed, mass-produced, and expensive hardware. One reason this reinvention has been so effective is because a lot of the equipment still being sold today is based upon older designs that have not been updated in many years.

Here is a selection of some of what's out there now:

• OpenPCR is a $600 thermocycler used for amplifying DNA for detection and sequencing. OpenPCR is at least ten times cheaper than competing commercial alternatives.
• Open Ephys is a hardware/software platform for electrically recording neural activity from multiple electrode channels. Cost savings are huge.
• Pulse Pal is a arbitrary wavefrom generator, competing with far more expensive commercial alternatives such as the Master 8.
• OpenStage is a complete motor control system that provides sub-micron motions for microscope stages. A system can be assembled for about $1000, which is what what some commercial vendors are charging for just the joystick input to their controllers.